Starting Oct. 1, Alberta sheriffs will be allowed to evict people from homes being used for illegal activities, including drugs and prostitution.

Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods (SCAN), a new provincial program, allows people to call a toll-free number to report suspicious activity. Alberta sheriffs will investigate and then contact the property owners, not the tenants.

"Sometimes property owners and landlords, they don't have the full picture of what's going on on their property," explained sheriff superintendent Neil LeMay on Thursday.

"This legislation has been in force in other provinces and they found when they bring it to the attention of the property owner or the landlord, very often they will take the action themselves to either curtail the activities or to evict the tenant."

If the property owner doesn't fix the problem, provincial legislation gives sheriffs the power to evict the residents, he said.

"We have, where I live, two houses down [the street], it was a crack house," said Pam Romich-Felde, who owns four rental properties in Alberta. The only thing she could do was call the police and hope they could come up with a strong enough case to lay criminal charges.

LeMay said the SCAN program should give people another option.

"Our standard of proof is lower, if I can use that term, or different, and we believe that using this approach will allow us to close these properties, close the problems, deal with the problems much quicker than the criminal side," he said.

Starting Oct. 1, people can call 1-866-960-SCAN (7226) to lodge their complaints, which will be investigated by two teams based in Edmonton and Calgary.